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Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux Comparison Shows Shortcomings

04-23-2013, 02:00 AM

Phoronix: Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux Comparison Shows Shortcomings

One week after delivering updated Radeon Gallium3D vs. AMD Catalyst benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux, we have to share this morning similar results for the open-source and reverse-engineered "Nouveau" Linux graphics driver compared to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver. While the Nouveau driver has come a long way and does support the latest Fermi and Kepler GPUs, it's not without its share of shortcomings. Eleven NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards were used in this latest Phoronix comparison.

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Nouveau is basically wasted man power. They really need documentation on how Nvidia graphic cards work if they want to make something remotely usable. A graphics card is not a simple piece of hardware as we all know.

Radeon driver is in much better shape due to the fact that is partially backed by AMD and some of its engineers.

Of course the Nouveau team is free to do whatever they want with their time, but in the end they will realise they have wasted a precious time in their life. People who want to use Nvidia for OpenGL and/or CUDA use Nvidia's binary driver. We all would like to have open source Nvidia drivers, because they make great graphics cards, but this is not going to work.

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Oh yeah, the GT 240. It never worked with nouveau, and probably never will. Nouveau developers are ignoring all the bug reports and the proposed fix (disable all acceleration for this chipset - an unaccelerated framebuffer is still *much* better than an unbootable system).

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The RE driver is very impressive for what it is and how it is made. That being said, the results illustrated here perfectly explain why I will never buy nvidia crap. At least not until they improve this situation dramatically.

To address the hostile message by "wargames", this is not wasted effort, since it is about the only way to actually get ANY usability out of nvidia crap without running their virus. I'd much rather run nouveau, even at the significant performance hit, than a hostile blob. In fact, up until about a year ago when I retired my last nvidia hardware, I did just that.

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The RE driver is very impressive for what it is and how it is made. That being said, the results illustrated here perfectly explain why I will never buy nvidia crap. At least not until they improve this situation dramatically.

To address the hostile message by "wargames", this is not wasted effort, since it is about the only way to actually get ANY usability out of nvidia crap without running their virus. I'd much rather run nouveau, even at the significant performance hit, than a hostile blob. In fact, up until about a year ago when I retired my last nvidia hardware, I did just that.

Lol don't like Nvidia don't buy/use thier hardware, simple... Nouveau is wasted effort. Use Intel if you want OSS drivers because that's all you'll get. I got a 670gtx with the blob that does what ever I want it to do. I also have a laptop with i5/HD4000 that's working properly "finally"and has good performance for what it is with the latest distos. All did not used to be well until the drivers caught up.

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Oh yeah, the GT 240. It never worked with nouveau, and probably never will. Nouveau developers are ignoring all the bug reports and the proposed fix (disable all acceleration for this chipset - an unaccelerated framebuffer is still *much* better than an unbootable system).

That's not a fix, it's a workaround. If you had a fix, we might just care.
Myself I really don't care (well, I do, but not to the point where I'd do something about it), my ~2000 hours of wasted free time on this project would be even more wasted (on the personal level anyway) if I'd spent them with the annoying bugs of users with cards I don't have (which is the factor that makes fixing things really hard, but don't suggest sending cards to me I don't have the time or nerve), instead of focusing on the fun stuff. It's either progress or stability, and we seem to focus very much on progress over stability overall.

Or how do you think we manage to keep up (in most areas) with the radeon drivers having no docs and a lot fewer contributors ? Of course, "no docs" is just an excuse, even with docs things wouldn't be moving along much faster at this point because there's no one there to do the time-consuming part, i.e. actually implementing things. That's their biggest advantage, AMD hires devs (and what ever happened to "the community will write the driver" ?)

Ah, I'm getting more and more frustrated it seems. Maybe I really should just quit as wargames suggests ...

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Lol don't like Nvidia don't buy/use thier hardware, simple... Nouveau is wasted effort. Use Intel if you want OSS drivers because that's all you'll get. I got a 670gtx with the blob that does what ever I want it to do. I also have a laptop with i5/HD4000 that's working properly "finally"and has good performance for what it is with the latest distos. All did not used to be well until the drivers caught up.

I'm a blob user myself, but there are some places where the OSS would be needed. For distros with live cd, they usually don't ship the blob on the disk- and it's probably better than just using the fbdev

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Of course, "no docs" is just an excuse, even with docs things wouldn't be moving along much faster at this point because there's no one there to do the time-consuming part, i.e. actually implementing things.

Then again, having docs may very well raise interest in the project. It wouldn't look like doing things blindly any more.